Afraid of the Dark Read Free Page A

Goderich had remained close over the years. It was Neil who’d asked Jack to take the case of Prisoner No. 977. Jack had no illusions of selling his friends and family on the everybody-deserves-a-lawyer argument. It was a huge pro bono undertaking for a sole practitioner, but Jack kept his involvement quiet—until it came time for the government to clear his visit to Gitmo, and the FBI background check left his neighbors wondering if he was a mob lawyer on the verge of indictment. Finally, he had to come clean. The reactions were pretty uniform.
    Are you kidding me?
    You’re defending a terrorist?
    His best friend, Theo Knight—a death row inmate until Jack and a DNA test had proved his innocence more than a decade ago—was the only one to shrug it off: “Dude, know what GITMO stands for? Giving Interrogation Teams More Options .”
    Funny, kind of—if you were pounding back beers at one of Theo’s bars in Miami. But once the airplane landed at Gitmo, there wasn’t a lot of laughter. Jack had read the report from the former prosecutor, who had resigned from the case in disgust. Prisoner No. 977 had been rounded up by Ethiopian troops from a suspected al-Qaeda safe house in southern Somalia. He was accused of sheltering Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, who was responsible for planning the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 2002 car-bombing attack in Kenya and missile attack on an Israeli airliner. A handwritten confession was the centerpiece of the case against him. He didn’t write it. The one-page document was handed to him for his signature after several days of beatings, forced administration of drugs, and threats against his family. It was written in a language (Amharic) that he didn’t speak, and he signed with his thumbprint, which was consistent with reports that he was completely illiterate. The Ethiopians turned him over to the Americans, to whom he refused to speak. Prison logs reflected that Prisoner No. 977 attempted to kill himself eleven hours after arriving at Gitmo. Eight weeks later he was on the so-called “frequent flier” program, where, in a two-week period, he was moved to a new cell 112 times—an average of every three hours—in order to ensure he was sleep deprived and disoriented. Over the three years at Guantánamo, he was repeatedly subjected to extreme cold, bright lights, and various stress positions, and he was often kept in solitary confinement.
    Still, he refused to speak to anyone—even to his lawyer.
    “I’m here to help you,” said Jack, almost pleading now. “You have no way of knowing this, but in twenty-eight of the thirty-three detainee cases heard since last January, federal judges in my country have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison. Many of those men were held without charges far longer than you.”
    The prisoner’s gaze drifted away. He looked at the prayer mat rolled neatly and resting atop his bunk, then up at the large clock on the wall, then back out to nothing. There was no reason for him to trust Jack. None.
    Fifteen minutes passed, Jack’s words meeting with silence. Even on death row, Jack never had a client ignore him like this.
    What now?
    Jack glanced at the JAG lawyer to his right, then looked at the prisoner, who was now leaning back in his chair. This was going nowhere. It was absurd, really—the Yale-educated attorney sitting at a card table in a dank shed trying to explain habeas corpus to an illiterate peasant who was chained to the floor. Jack was running out of time, and becoming anxious was not going to help. He considered his next move, then completely shifted gears.
    “My mother and grandmother were actually born in Cuba,” Jack said.
    Jack paused for the translator. He knew very little about the man in shackles before him. But he knew that he must have family. Maybe they could connect on that level. The prisoner hadn’t seen or spoken to his loved